The S3 Cookbook

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The S3 Cookbook

Get cooking with Amazon's Simple Storage Service

About the Book

Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) has been described as “Storage in the cloud”. I like to think of it as Amazon lending you some hard-drive space on their servers, and giving you lots of interesting ways to put data there and share it with others.

Getting started with S3 is pretty straightforward, but even with its simple interface (really, because of its simplicity), there are a lot of things you can do with it. The S3 Cookbook will give you a quick introduction to S3’s architecture, get you set up with some tools, and then let you explore.

The recipes provide you with the code to do all of the everyday things that people are doing with S3, as well as the more esoteric ones. They will help you get the simple things done quickly, and inspire you with ideas of your own.

You will learn to

  • get started with S3: set up your account, get some tools and get coding
  • upload and download data from S3
  • list all of the files you have in your S3 Buckets
  • add metadata to your objects
  • serve your objects as bit torrents
  • share your data with others (everyone, just a chosen few or nobody at all)
  • backup and restore your pictures, databases or any directory on any computer to S3
  • log who accesses your objects and how often
  • serve assets such as images, MP3s or the static files on your website

S3 is built for people like you and me: programmers. If you feel the itch to create your own library to talk to S3, then chapters 4 and 5 are for you. Chapter 4 walks you through the S3 authentication process, and builds an S3 authentication library using Test Driven Development. Chapter 5 builds the beginnings of an S3 library, giving you everything you need to build one of your own, or take the code that’s in the book and go from there.

For a complete list of the recipes, see the table of contents below.

Interested? Download a sample of the book.

All of the code in the book is MIT licensed and available on GitHub.

About the Author

Scott Patten
Scott Patten

Scott is a programmer and web developer. He has an MSc in Physics from the University of British Columbia and spent a decade gainfully employed as a physicist shooting lasers at polymers and ink drops at paper.

In 2006, Scott switched to programming full time. He joined Ruboss as a co-founder in 2009, and created Leanpub with Peter in 2010. Scott is the author of The S3 Cookbook and the lead author of Leanpub's book generation engine.

Table of Contents

  • Preface
    • Conventions Used in This Book
    • Using Code Examples
    • Getting the Code
    • How to Contact Me
    • Why Ruby
  • Chapter 1. What is S3, and what can I use it for?
    • Backups
    • Serving Data
    • Use Cases
    • NASDAQ Market Replay
    • Jason Kester
  • Chapter 2. S3’s Architecture
    • A Quick, Tounge-in-cheek, Overview
    • Amazon S3 and REST
    • Buckets
    • S3 Objects
    • Access Control Policies
    • Logging Object Access
  • S3 Recipes
    • Signing up for Amazon S3
    • Installing Ruby and the AWS/S3 Gem
    • Setting up the S3SH command line tool
    • Installing the S3Lib library
    • Making a request using s3Lib
    • Getting the response with AWS/S3
    • Installing The FireFox S3 Organizer
    • Working with multiple s3 accounts
    • Accessing your buckets through virtual hosting
    • Creating a bucket
    • Creating a European bucket
    • Finding a bucket’s location
    • Deleting a bucket
    • Synchronizing two buckets
    • Using REXML and XPath to parse an XML response from S3
    • Listing All Of Your Buckets
    • Listing All Objects in a Bucket
    • Finding the Total Size of a Bucket
    • Listing only objects with keys starting with some prefix
    • Paginating the list of objects in a bucket
    • Listing objects in folders
    • Uploading a file to s3
    • Doing a streaming upload to S3
    • Deleting an object
    • Copying an object
    • Downloading a File From S3
    • Streaming a File From S3
    • Streaming a file from S3 by hand
    • Adding metadata to an object
    • Reading an object’s metadata
    • Understanding access control policies
    • Setting a canned access control policy
    • Reading a bucket or object’s ACL
    • Granting public read access to a bucket or object using S3SH
    • Giving another user access to an object or bucket using S3SH
    • Giving another user access to an object or bucket by hand
    • Giving access to a bucket or object with a special URL
    • Finding the canonical user ID
    • Keeping the Current ACL When You Change an Object
    • Making sure that all objects in a bucket are publicly readable
    • Creating a directory structure in an S3 bucket
    • Restoring a directory from an S3 bucket
    • Synchronizing a directory with s3sync
    • Detecting if a File on S3 is the Same as a Local File
    • Synchronizing a Directory
    • Synchronizing Multiple Directories
    • Cleaning up a synchronized directory
    • Backing up a mysql database to S3
    • Backing up your SVN repository
    • Determining logging status for a bucket
    • Enabling logging on a bucket
    • Allowing someone else to read logs in one of your buckets
    • Logging multiple buckets to a single bucket
    • Parsing logs
    • Parsing log files to find out how many times an object has been accessed
    • Accessing your logs using S3stat
    • Using S3 as an asset host
    • Serving compressed content from S3
    • Serving user generated data from s3
    • Seeding a bit torrent
  • Chapter 4. Authenticating S3 Requests
    • Authenticating S3 Requests
    • Writing an S3 Authentication Library
    • The HTTP Verb
    • The Canonicalized Positional Headers
    • The Canonicalized Amazon Headers
    • Date Stamping Requests
    • The Canonicalized Resource
    • The Full Signature
    • Signing the Request
    • Making the Request
    • Error Handling
  • The S3 API
    • Introduction
    • Listing All of Your Buckets
    • Finding a Bucket
    • Creating a Bucket
    • Deleting a Bucket
    • Refactoring the Bucket Class
    • The
    • Reading a Bucket or Object’s Access Control Policy
    • Refreshing the Cached ACL
    • Creating a New Grant
    • Tieing the Acl Class to a Bucket or Object
  • Appendix A. A Short Introduction to Ruby
    • An Example Program
    • Ruby Data Types
    • Output
    • Control Statements
    • Blocks and iterators
    • Methods
    • Classes
    • Variables and Scope

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